Mr Pisasale, 65, has been the face of Ipswich since the glory days of rugby league's Allan Langer and the Walters footballing trio, Steve, Kevin and Kerrod, and since Pauline Hanson ended her stint as an Ipswich councillor in 1994-95 and as the Member for Oxley from 1996 until 1998.

He has been an Ipswich councillor since 1991 – except for the brief period when Ms Hanson was a councillor – and became the city's mayor in 2004.

His decision on Tuesday to resign in his pyjamas after entering a media conference at St Andrew's Ipswich Private Hospital in a wheelchair was genuinely bizarre.

While mayor, Mr Pisasale dons a wig and sunglasses during a bizarre escalation of his feud with then-police minister Jo-Ann Miller in 2015.

Photo: Screengrab

Where he began

Paul Pisasale studied industrial chemistry at Queensland University of Technology and began his imprint on Ipswich in a chemical laboratory, before buying the Cecil Hotel, then Colliers Restaurant, in the heart of the city.

Mr Pisasale leaves the Crime and Corruption Commission public hearing on April 19, 2017.

Photo: Chris Hyde

He also began an unemployment business, called the Young Unemployed People of Ipswich (YUPI), where he co-ordinated training places for teenagers as Ipswich's coal mines began to close.

His media profile at YUPI helped him win a seat on the Ipswich City Council in March 1991 and his star kept rising.

His older brother Charlie Pisasale is also a long-serving Ipswich councillor, having served since 1995, and holds the council division that covers Amberley, Leichhardt and Yamanto.

Charlie will tell you how the Pisasale surname is really pronounced: with the emphasis on the first two syllables, not the way we always hear it with the third syllable drawn out.

Paul Pisasale has been through good times and bad times.

The 1995 NetBet affair – when three local Labor heavyweights, Paul Pisasale, Ipswich West MP Don Livingstone and backbencher Bill D'Arcy were named as stakeholders in a state government gaming company called GoCorp – was hard.

Mr Pisasale's wife Janet told the Ipswich local paper in December 2012 of the impact of his career as a politician on her family.

"Paul didn't realise the impact he had on the family because, well, you know, Paul goes 90 miles an hour so he doesn't realise things until later," Mrs Pisasale said.

"He has been to more sports games and watched every other child in Ipswich than he has to see his own children play sport.

"We had three children so I did the sports, the education, the bringing up of the children, the things like that."

Those three offspring are now adults; James is 35, Lisa – who worked as Paul's mayoral campaign manager in 2016 – is 33 and David is 29.

No one was at the Pisasale family home on Tuesday afternoon, but family photographs on the mantelpiece and a photograph of a young Paul and Janet on their wedding day could be seen through glass on the front door.

The Pisasale home in Ipswich on Tuesday, June 6 - the day former mayor Paul Pisasale announced his resignation.

Photo: Tony Moore

There's a road at Yamanto named Pisasale Drive after the Pisasales' parents, Maria and Guiseppe (Joe) Pisasale.

Guiseppe and Maria – like many postwar migrants – emigrated to Ipswich in 1949 and Maria worked at the Ipswich Woollen Mills, while Joe worked with the Ipswich City Council and washed bottles in pubs until 3am to make a little extra money.

Into the spotlight

In the early 1990s Paul Pisasale chaired an economic lobby group called the West Moreton Regional Development Corporation, which once researched the viability of a second airport between Ipswich and Toowoomba.

That became a reality decades later, but for Toowoomba courtesy of Toowoomba's Wellcamp Airport, not for Ipswich.

There were battles with the city's former mayor Dave Underwood, battles to win control of Australia's first internet company owned by a council, Global Info Links, battles with Ms Hanson's then-IT specialist, Scott Balson, and battles with Bundamba MP Jo-Ann Miller.

Mr Pisasale became a director at a TAFE campus, became the city's economic development committee chairman and had an earlier, unsuccessful tilt at mayor heading a Labor team. He never forgot the loss.

He was defeated by the former chair of the neighbouring Moreton Shire council, John Nugent, who remained Ipswich mayor from 1995 until 2004, when Mr Pisasale's light at the top of the local government tunnel finally began to shine.

And then as a four-term mayor, Mr Pisasale's career soared, with decisions to forge a new university campus, a controversial decision to build a new city heart at North Ipswich and then later the decision of the council to buy out the old city heart with plans for the council to develop it.

Announcing his resignation from the council on Queensland Day 2017, Mr Pisasale, who has suffered a long and public battle with multiple sclerosis, said doctors had told him it was time to put his health first.

"To my wife and family, I just want to say thanks," he said.

"Talking to the kids, they said 'welcome back. Dad'.

"But after 25 years of not getting a weekend off and not having a holiday and getting so engrossed in the job of the city, it does take its toll.